


The Truth is Lying Next to You

by ArtistOwl



Series: What the Truth Is [1]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fae & Fairies, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, tsshipmonth2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:47:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26636821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArtistOwl/pseuds/ArtistOwl
Summary: You can’t lie to your soulmate. It’s how you’re supposed to find them in the first place. It’s how you know you can trust each other after you do.Not that that affects Virgil much. He can't lie to anyone at all. He probably doesn't even have a soulmate - he's pretty sure that they're a humans-only thing, which is. Definitely a category that he decidedly does not fall into.
Relationships: Anxiety | Virgil Sanders/Creativity | Roman "Princey" Sanders, Logic | Logan Sanders/Morality | Patton Sanders
Series: What the Truth Is [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1981750
Comments: 17
Kudos: 270





	The Truth is Lying Next to You

**Author's Note:**

> Based on tsshipmonth2020's Soulmate September day 15 prompt, "It is impossible to lie to your soulmate"  
> https://tsshipmonth2020.tumblr.com/post/622544912923148288/what-is-soulmate-september-soulmate-september-is

You can’t lie to your soulmate. It’s how you’re supposed to find them in the first place. It’s how you know you can trust each other after you do.

Things didn’t always work out that way of course. Honesty doesn’t always mean trust. It also doesn’t always mean compatibility. Virgil, growing up with only his mom and brother, knew that well enough.

It didn’t matter in any case. He couldn’t lie to anyone. He also probably didn’t have a soulmate - Virgil was relatively certain that was a humans-only thing, which was. Definitely a category that he decidedly did not fall into.

His mother told him that she didn’t realize he was a changeling until it was too late, and she didn’t figure out how it was even possible to reverse it until after that. A fae had stolen her real son and put Virgil, the fae’s child, in his place.

“It’s so much cooler to have a faerie brother than a human one,” Virgil’s older brother, Janus, had said once. He’d meant it. “Besides, you’re the one stuck with us, so no point wondering about him anyway.” That was a lie.

Virgil may not have been able to tell a direct lie, but he could always tell when someone else did.

That was one of his less strange attributes. Iron and salt burned him, red berries and daisies and four-leaf clovers gave him allergic reactions, he couldn’t even cross a stream of running water. If someone wore any clothes inside out, he lost sight of them entirely. When he cried and threw tantrums as a child, all the milk in the house spoiled. The one time he could remember playing ring-around-the-rosie, all of the other kid’s eyes glazed over as they danced, and when he let go they hadn’t remembered any time had passed. Whenever other kids picked on him, they would always end up finding spiders in their lockers, or backpacks, or pencil cases, or, once, their shirt collar. His temperature was always colder than normal humans, but summer still felt unbearably hot to him, and whenever it stormed he was always filled with the urge to run outside in the middle of it. 

Worst of all, he had been born in winter.

That didn’t just come with the usual issues that having a birthday in the purgatory between Christmas and New Year. Virgil and Janus had done a lot of research over the years, and they were pretty sure that Virgil was from the Winter court - that he was Unseelie. To be fair, the Seelie court wasn’t exactly nice, but when they hurt humans in the stories it was generally due to mischievousness, or forgetting how fragile humans are, or getting mad at a human who offended them. The Unseelie, however, generally hurt humans with malicious intentions. “Maybe it’s not all based on when you were born,” Janus said. Enough qualifiers to count for a truth. Enough qualifiers for Virgil to know that he didn’t want Virgil to know he didn’t mean it.

Virgil was, put bluntly, a freak.

He was almost glad that he didn’t have a soulmate. Who’d want to be stuck with him?

* * *

Virgil wasn’t entirely certain why he was here.

Well, he was hypothetically here because his college roommate, Patton, wanted to visit his new soulmate, Logan, and didn’t want to make Logan’s roommate third-wheel in his own dorm room when Patton went to visit Logan. Virgil was probably also here because of how scarily competent Patton was at his make-Virgil-socialize agenda.

Virgil didn’t tend to have friends that he interacted with outside of school hours growing up, and even then, he would probably describe them more as “people he talked to sometimes”. He knew it was mostly his own fault, he was always paranoid growing up that he would end up outing himself as a fae if he spent too long around people, and by the time he was old enough to get tired of that, half the social skills he was supposed to have learned had been replaced by anxiety. The bullying didn’t help, of course.

So yeah, this was pretty new, and Virgil was reasonably certain it would not be happening if his roommate was not a force of nature. He didn’t think that they needed to be worried about Logan’s roommate, Roman, feeling like a third-wheel; Roman was charismatic and sociable, and he fit in with the other two so well that Virgil felt like he was somehow fourth-wheeling on the three of them. Virgil usually didn’t contribute much - although today he was, because they were talking about a subject very near and dear to his heart.

“I’m _telling_ you Logan, Mothman is out there,” he said.

“There is _no_ evolutionary evidence that such creatures could exist!”

“Of course there isn’t, it’s only him.”

“That is not how biology works!”

Logan sounded absolutely incensed, though the effect was lessened somewhat with Patton sitting on his lap and Logan hugging him to his chest, resting his chin on Patton’s shoulder as he glared at Virgil. Patton, for his part, seemed utterly unperturbed, used to the group’s antics at this point. Roman was laying on his stomach on his bed, looking between Logan and Virgil like they were a particularly interesting tennis match. Virgil was sprawled over Logan’s swivel chair, one leg slung over the armrest, elbow propping himself up on the other one, wrapped in a blanket.

“There cannot only be a single member of a species, it’s impossible.”

“Ah, but there had to be a first member of each species at one point or another, right? Check and mate.”

“And _what creature_ , pray tell, are you suggesting that _Mothman_ evolved from?!” At Logan’s exclamation Virgil finally lost it, throwing back his head and cackling like a hag. Logan looked down at Patton. “Dear, could you please cover your ears? I’m afraid I need to swear at your roommate,” which only sent Virgil into further hysterics and made Roman join him.

Even Patton giggled as he said, “don’t swear at Virgil!”

“I must Patton,” Logan deadpanned. “His understanding of basic biology is abysmal. There is no evidence that Mothman does or has ever existed, and at his size, if he did exist, there would be evidence. It should be evidence enough against him that none of the so-called “sightings” have ever been by an accredited scientist.”

“Maybe he’s just _really_ sneaky,” Virgil managed to gasp. He couldn’t remember ever laughing this hard.

“Maybe Mothman’s magic and he can’t be seen by most people,” Patton suggested, looking up innocently at Logan’s betrayed expression.

“Ooh, yeah!” Roman exclaimed, “maybe he’s like one of those magic beings that can only be seen in certain circumstances.”

“Your argument has just grown even weaker.”

“No wait!” Roman hurled his upper body towards the floor in a way that simultaneously made Virgil nauseous and made him want to lunge forward to catch Roman’s head before it cracked against the floor. Luckily, Roman caught himself in time, and rummaged under his bed for a few moments before making a triumphant sound and slid a chest out, rooting around inside it for a moment before triumphantly holding up...a rock? “It’s a witch’s stone!”

It took Virgil a moment to realize what Roman was holding, he’d always seen them referred to as hag stones when he and Janus did their research. It was an otherwise ordinary rock, but there was a hole worn clean through it. 

Virgil tried to convince himself that this was not a reason to panic. Hag stones revealed fae, sure, but that was when fae were hiding, or invisible, or glamoured to look like humans -

Wait.

Virgil hadn’t been glamoured to look like a human, right? He’d been born less creepy looking because he was a changeling. Sure, he didn’t look quite human, with his skin so pale it was nearly purple, his slightly too-long limbs and tiny feet, his too-pointed ears, one eye a vivid green and the other a piercing violet. Granted, he’d grown out his hair enough to cover his ears, wore foundation that made him look less freakishly pale, and wore a green contact lens over his purple eye. So there was nothing obviously fae for Roman to see through the stone...right?

“A what stone?” Logan asked, voice flat.

“A witch stone! It lets you see things that have been hidden, and the true nature of things. You could probably see Mothman through it.”

“Everything you just said is ridiculous.”

“Why do you have that?” Virgil couldn’t help but ask.

“It was a gift from a cousin when they went beachcombing,” Roman replied. “But I bet you could totally see Mothman through this.” Roman held the stone over one eye, looking through the hole. “Maybe,” he said in a voice suited for telling ghost stories, “he’s in this room right now!”

“That’s ridiculous,” Logan said.

“Hi Mr. ...uh, Man? Mr. Man?” Patton laughed. “How do you formally address Mothman?”

Roman began slowly, exaggeratedly, scanning the room. “Perhaps we should ask him our- JESUS CHRIST” Roman cut himself off with a scream, dropping the hagstone and staring at Virgil with absolute horror in his eyes.

His heartbeat pounded in his ears. Virgil sat up straight, pulling his legs up under the blanket. “Uh...no, I’m Virgil?” Please don’t have seen anything, please don’t have -  
After several moments of Roman’s gaping silence, Patton cleared his throat. “Uh, Roman, what’s...”

Roman jerked like he’d suddenly come out of a trance. “Oh! Oh, yeah, uh, I just…” he looked at Virgil, then back at Patton and laughed nervously, picking up the stone. “The light must have glinted off the rock in a weird way.” He held the stone back up to his eye. “I’m sure…” He sucked in a breath and flinched away from Virgil. He trailed off, then looked at the stone itself, poking his finger through it, turning it around, examining it. “Uh...okay, that’s um. Really weird.”

“Why, what did you see?” Logan asked. 

“Uh...here, why don’t you -” Roman tossed the stone over to Logan. 

“Or we could just not,” Virgil tried, pressing further back into the chair, clutching the blanket closer.

“Oh,” Logan blanched, his jaw clicking shut. Virgil didn’t think he’d ever seen Logan look genuinely scared before. “Oh. My. That is…” he lowered the stone and began examining it as well. “...absolutely impossible. This is a rock, how on earth is it...” 

“What? What do I…”

“You wouldn’t happen to have been possessed by a demon recently, Virgil?” Roman asked, the levity in his tone forced.

No. “Not that I’m aware of.”

“Why? What are you all looking at?” Patton reached for the hag stone but Logan held it out of his reach, giving Patton an apologetic look when he looked hurt at the action.

“I would not recommend you look through the stone Patton, given your...erm, arachnophobia.”

“Wait, what do spiders have to do with anything?” Virgil asked.

“Well you kind of look like a horrifyingly terrifying spider monster through it,” Roman said.

What.

Virgil pressed himself further into the blanket, tucking his head under it like a hood shading his eyes, wishing fervently that the shadows would just swallow him up. This wasn’t fair. He didn’t even know he had a different form, how was he supposed to know he needed to hide it! “Horrifyingly terrifying spider monster?” he echoed hollowly.

“You aren’t a horrifyingly terrifying spider monster, obviously!” Roman rushed to say. “You just look, uh…”

Virgil curled up tighter. “Scary?”

Roman shook his head rapidly. “You don’t look sc-” He cut himself off, tried again. “You don’t look s-” He shook his head. “You don’t look -” He rubbed his throat, looking supremely confused before a look of dawning comprehension spread across his face, the same moment Patton gasped in understanding, and Logan let out a quiet “oh.” 

Not that Virgil could hear much of that over the blood roaring in his ears and then the wind whistling around him and it was dark and he was flying and he was falling and the darkness was squeezing him so tight and he hit the ground with a thud.

Virgil looked up.

He was in his own room, still tucked into Logan’s blanket. The room was untouched from when he had left earlier.

Virgil pulled out his phone and with shaky fingers opened the emergency contact call on his phone.

One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four rings…

“ _The number you are trying to reach is unavailable_ -”

Virgil gave an aggravated yell and threw his phone across the carpet. Damn it Janus. Virgil drew his legs up to his face and rested his forehead on his knees, groaning.

He had a soulmate. 

His soulmate thought that he was terrifying.

He could also teleport, which on any other day would have been the biggest piece of news he could have received. Alas, he had to find out on the day when everything went to shit.

He had a soulmate.

He had to talk to Roman.

Would Roman even want to talk to him?

What about Patton and Logan? He roomed with Patton, they’d have to talk at some point.

Would Patton want him to change rooms?

Would they sell him to the government for the CIA to do experiments and testing on him?

Maybe Roman hated him for being his soulmate.

Maybe Roman wasn’t his soulmate and it was all a misunderstanding.

No but what if the others sold him to the government. Or private investors. Or grad students. Virgil wasn’t human, he was a species that was thought to not actually exist, that was the sort of thing that Important Types Of People tended to be very interested in, and not in ways he wanted them to be.

“-irgil! Virgil? Can you hear me, can you breathe like this for me?”

Breathing. Did he need to do it? There were frogs that could hibernate over winter without breathing. Oh, wait, no, he was breathing way too fast, that was the issue.

“Come on now, just like this, okay? In for four, hold for seven, out for eight…”

The voice (the familiar voice?) repeated the mantra until Virgil’s breathing slowed to a normal rate.

“There you go.”

Virgil looked up into Patton’s freckled face, the other boy’s eyes relieved behind his glasses. Virgil flinched away before he could stop himself, looking wildly around the room as Patton’s face flashed with hurt. Logan and Roman (Roman) were hovering behind Patton, expressions of concern on their faces.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He didn’t know what he was apologizing for, or to.

“Oh no honey, you don’t need to apologize,” Patton soothed.

Logan cleared his throat. “May I ask, what exactly happened?”

Of course, they’d want to know. Virgil looked back down at his knees. He couldn’t tell them. He had to tell them. Tell them something at least. What could he possibly tell them?

_Hi, yes, I’m not human and am actually descended from a malevolent race of magic beings_.

“Did something happen to you? Roman asked hesitantly. “I mean - _something_ obviously yote you out of the room, I don’t know what I saw through the witch stone but it wasn’t _you_ -”

That startled a laugh out of Virgil, and he kept laughing, a tone of histeria woven through. The others startled, and looked even more concerned, but Virgil couldn’t stop. Typical fae, laughing at a funeral and crying at a wedding. He wanted so badly to say yes. To tell them that there was some outside force messing with him, that it wasn’t him they had seen through the hag stone, that he was normal, and not dangerous.

Not that he had a choice to tell anything but the truth in the first place. 

“No, Roman, that’s me.” Virgil shook his head. “I don’t know what you saw - this is the only face I ever knew I had - but, uh. It was probably me.”

“...How?”

Virgil looked Roman square in the eyes, so there would be no doubt to his honesty. “I’m not human.”

The three of them looked various levels of taken aback. Virgil tilted his face to the floor and sighed softly.

“...Alright.”

Virgil managed to not wretch his neck when he jerked his head up at Roman but it was a near thing. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Alright,” Roman nodded, more sure this time. “You’re not human. That’s fine. You’re still Virgil. You’re still -” _my soulmate_.

Virgil looked at Roman incredulously. “You don’t even know what I am.”

“A spider person?”

“A faery.” Which Virgil regretted as soon as he said it out loud, if only because it sounded ridiculous when he said it like that. 

Logan raised an eyebrow sharply. “A _fairy_?” he said, in utter disbelief.

“Yeah.”

“Like...Tinkerbell?” Patton’s face was screwed up in confusion.

Virgil turned his incredulous look to Patton. “Do I _look_ like a pixie?” he asked. “A faery, like the fae. The Fair Folk. The Good Neighbors. The Gentry.”

“Oh, like Midsummer Night’s Dream?” Roman asked.

“Closer to that, yeah. Do you - do any of you know about the fae courts?”

Patton and Logan shook their heads, Roman made a face and tilted his hand back and forth. “A little. Aren’t there four, one for each season?”

“Yes, but they’re each divided into two main courts.”

Roman snapped his fingers. “Yeah! Spring and summer are the, uh -”

“Seelie,” Virgil supplied.

“The _Seelie_ , yes! And then fall and winter are Unseelie. And, uh, the Seelie are good and the Unseelie are evil.”

“I wouldn’t call the Seelie _good_ , but yeah, the Unseelie are evil. Do you know what they look like?”

“Nonexistent?” Logan tried.

“Pretty dancing people?” Roman supplied.

“With wings?” Patton added.

“I mean some of them probably have wings, but the ‘pretty dancing people’ describes the Seelie pretty well,” Virgil said. “The Unseelie are super monstrous though. They’re usually either just really ugly, or some amalgamation of freaky animals.” Virgil sat back, and watched the others connect the dots.

“You’re not monstrous,” Patton said instantly.

“You didn’t look through the hag stone,” Virgil said, affecting a mild tone he didn’t feel.

“You’re not monstrous,” Roman said firmly. 

Virgil raised his brow at him. “I don’t know how you were physically able to say that even, seeing as how you were genuinely scared of me earlier.”

“I wasn’t scared of _you_ Virgil, I said you _looked scary_. Big difference.”

Which - okay, that did check out, but still - “Are we just going to gloss over the fact that I just admitted that I was a non-human descended from a malevolent race of magic beings?”

“You are not malevolent,” Logan said. “You are Virgil. You have yet to display any malevolent actions towards us aside from the mild hostility you exhibited earlier on in our interactions. Even if -” here, Logan’s face screwed up in annoyance. “Even if you are not human, or possess magical abilities, neither of which should be possible.”

Virgil tucked a lock of hair behind his ear, drawing the others’ eyes to the pointed tip. “It is possible, unfortunately.”

“You can’t do magic.” Logan said it like he was trying to convince himself.

“I wish I couldn’t. I can barely control any of it.”

“We’re not scared of you Virgil.”

“You should be!”

“Okay, look,” Roman said. “How many people have you killed?”

Virgil recoiled. “What, none, I’d never -”

“How many people have you hurt?”

“I - I mean, I’ve been in fights before -”

“How many did you start?” 

“None of them, I just wanted to be left alone.”

“There then, see?”

“That - no, that’s not how it -”

“I’d say it does kiddo,” Patton said, and it almost hurt, the sweet nickname.

“Anyway, can we talk about how you’re my soulmate?” Roman asked, smiling.

Virgil spluttered. “That - that _cannot_ be anywhere in your priorities right now.”

Roman’s smile dimmed. “Is it not in yours?”

“I didn’t think that I even _had_ a soulmate until now,” Virgil admitted in a voice that came out far to quiet for his liking. 

“You didn’t?”

“No because I’m not human, Roman. I’m -” Virgil scrubbed at his face with his palms. “I’m not being - being self-deprecating or over-dramatic here with any of this, I’m literally not human. We’re different species. I’m a Winter fae, I have powers I can’t control, I’m apparently a spider-monster -”

“Oh I _absolutely_ have questions, I have so many questions, I think we all do -” Logan and Patton nodded in agreement, “-and I’m actually kind of freaking out but mostly about the fact that hey wow magic is a thing? But you - dude, you’re _Virgil_. You don’t even kill the bugs you find in your and Patton’s room when you deal with them, forgive me if I’m not quaking in my boots at the sight of you. Besides,” Roman took Virgil’s hand with a dazzling smile. “The universe saw fit to make you my soulmate, so you can’t be all that bad.”

Virgil stared at the hand clasping his own. “You should be scared of me,” he said softly.

“Well I’m not,” Roman said. “If you kill me, it’ll be because I was struck blind by your beauty - and man, what a way to go.”

“ _Ro-man_.” Virgil hid his burning face behind his knees as Roman laughed above him. It was almost enough for Virgil to hope, tentatively, that maybe things wouldn’t be so bad after all.


End file.
